NMMMHS Guide to the Mars Perseverance Rover Mission 1 Mars Perseverance & Ingenuity Launch – July 30, 2020 Landing – February 18, 2021 Mission Goals: •Perseverance will explore an area on Mars that is interpreted to be an ancient river delta, and it will also select and prepare samples of Mars for return to Earth by a future mission. •The Perseverance mission is planned to last a year and a half, but if the rover is functional after that, the mission will continue. The Opportunity Rover was only designed to last 90 days, but the mission continued for almost 15 years. Previous Mars rovers: •NASA's first rover on Mars was modest: SoJourner, in the lower left of the photo, is the size of a microwave oven; and it demonstrated in 1997 that a robot could move across the surface of the Red Planet. •NASA's next Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, upper left, were each the size of a golf cart. After landing in 2004, they discovered evidence that the planet once hosted running water before becoming a frozen desert. Spirit roamed for 6 years and was the first to climb a mountain on Mars. Opportunity roved the planet for 14 and a half years, traveled a Marathon distance, and discovered gypsum, hematite nodules, evidence for long-lasting water in the past, and explored the rim of a large impact crater. •The car-sized Curiosity rover landed in 2012. Curiosity, right side of the photo above, discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, hosted a lake billions of years ago and an environment that could have supported microbial life. Each rover mission learns from the previous ones and the science, technology, and rover designs are increasingly advanced. •Once every 26 months, Earth and Mars move into orbital positions that allow for the shortest duration trip. This is why two other Mars explorers launched at around the same time as Perseverance, in summer 2020, and are due to arrive within a week of Perseverance. •The Hope Mars Mission from the United Arab Emirates, launched on July 19, 2020 and successfully went into orbit around Mars on February 9, 2021. The mission goal is to orbit for at least one Mars year to study Mars' climate and atmosphere. On July 23, 2020 China launched Tianwen-1, which includes an orbiter and rover. It entered orbit on February 10, 2020 and will orbit for some months before the rover is sent to a selected site on Mars. The other nations that have had successful Mars missions, in addition to the US and USSR, are ESA, and India. NMMMHS Guide to the Mars Perseverance Rover Mission 2 Spacecraft Design: •The Mars 2020 mission spacecraft design is based on the Curiosity Rover mission – with improvements. •The Cruise Stage, for travel between Earth and Mars, includes an aeroshell consisting of a backshell and heat shield, in which the rover and its landing system are enclosed. •The Entry, Descent, and Landing System (EDL) protects Perseverance as it enters into the Martian atmosphere. It includes the aeroshell, a parachute, a descent vehicle, and a skycrane that will lower the rover to the Martian surface on tethers. •This is the first mission to have cameras and microphones that will record the descent and landing on Mars and enable us to see the landing! There are cameras mounted on the backshell that look up to the parachute, on the descent stage looking down at the sky crane, and on the rover looking up at the sky crane and down at the surface. •There are two new technologies that will help with landing since it is a difficult landing site. The parachute is not a timed event, it will take place when the spacecraft is at the optimum time and elevation; this is called a “range trigger.” Then the descent stage will actually fly over the terrain looking for a safe place to land and lower the rover to the surface at the proper place; this is called “terrain relative navigation.” No other Mars lander has ever done this before. Landing Site - Jezero Crater: •The landing site on Mars is Jezero Crater, an old impact crater. Billions of years ago, it was filled by a lake, about the same size as Lake Tahoe, fed by a river. The river deposited material into the lake that formed a delta. Life is often present in similar areas on Earth. The outline of river delta material that flowed into Jezero Lake is shown in the image to the right (Image: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/22475/Jezero-crater-mars- 2020s-landing-site/) •The rover will study sediments that were once under water in the river delta and along the lake shore. Samples of rock in these regions might contain evidence of ancient, microscopic life. •2/3 of Mars’ northern hemisphere was once covered in liquid water. Something happened about 3 billion years ago that caused the water to freeze or evaporate into space. Go to this site for an artist drawing of what Mars might have looked like with water and an article on the subJect: https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/march/nasa-research-suggests-mars-once-had-more- water-than-earth-s-arctic-ocean NMMMHS Guide to the Mars Perseverance Rover Mission 3 The Mission Plan •Perseverance is a car-sized rover. It will go on a traverse that includes studying the delta sediments at different levels. At geological units of interest, it will be directed to drill into the surface, collect samples, and seal them in tubes. Once a diverse set of samples have been gathered, Perseverance will place them on the surface of Mars to await being collected and returned to Earth by a future mission. •As sophisticated as Perseverance is, it can’t do the kind of analysis that we can on Earth. That’s why the rover will prepare samples for return to Earth from Mars. The craft that will retrieve and launch the samples is still in the planning stages, but can hopefully get the samples to Earth by 2031. •Later, Perseverance will explore Jezero Crater’s rim to examine and study rocks once deep within Mars brought to the surface by the asteroid that impacted and created the crater. •The rover will look at minerals at the microscopic level. It will try to identify organic elements that form life on Earth that might be indicators of past life during the time of the delta formation. Instruments and Design of Perseverance: •Go here for a 3D Model!: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/) •The initial design of the rover started on paper almost 10 years ago. Based on the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover configuration, Perseverance is car-sized, about 10 feet long (not including the arm), 9 feet wide, and 7 feet tall. But at 2,260 pounds (1,025 kilograms), it weighs less than a compact car. Perseverance Scientific Instruments: •All the rover’s instruments complement each other and many are specifically designed to look for evidence of life. There are spectrometers, cameras, a radar instrument, and a weather station. •SHERLOC (The Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) is on the end of the rover’s arm and can detect organic matter. A spectrometer will provide close-up imaging and use an ultraviolet (UV) laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy and detect organic compounds. SHERLOC will be the first UV Raman spectrometer to fly to the surface of Mars and will provide complementary measurements with other instruments in the payload. NMMMHS Guide to the Mars Perseverance Rover Mission 4 •PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) is also part of the instrument package on the arm and measures the composition of rocks and soil. An X-ray fluorescence spectrometer contains a high- resolution imager to determine the fine-scale elemental composition of the Martian surface. PIXL will provide capabilities that permit more detailed detection and analysis of chemical elements. •Mastcam-Z is an advanced camera system on the mast with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom. The instrument also will determine mineralogy of the Martian surface and assist with rover operations. •SuperCam is the large camera on the mast and is usually represented as the rover’s eye. It can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineral identification. It will also be able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and dust from a distance. Roger Wiens from Los Alamos National Laboratory here in NM is the principal investigator for this instrument. •MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) is the rover’s weather station that will provide measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity, and dust size and shape through a number of sensors. •MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment) is a technology investigation that will attempt to produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is a requirement for sending humans to Mars in the future. Mars explorers can use oxygen to breath and make rocket fuel. •RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment) is a ground-penetrating radar that will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geologic structure down to about 30 feet below the surface, depending on what’s under the rover at the time. •The drill on the arm can only penetrate down to about 5 centimeters below the surface, but previous missions showed that’s deep enough to get to some of the sediments we’re interested in. •Perseverance will enJoy greater autonomy than any previous rover with the ability to travel up to 200 meters without any commends from Earth.